RYAN TOOK AINSLEY FOR PIZZA AFTER THE PARK AND THEN TO
the toy store—for a green necklace, of course. It was eight o’clock when they got home. Ainsley took a quick bath, brushed her teeth, and put on her pajamas. A brief disagreement over sleeping in her necklace followed, which Ryan won, and she crawled into bed. Ryan sat next to her, and they took turns reading—for the tenth night in a row—the story about the stray dog. Ryan knew it was only a matter of time before Ainsley asked for a puppy. Tonight she was fading by page 8, and by page 12 Ryan thought she was out cold. He switched off the lamp and kissed her on the forehead. Her eyes blinked open.
“Daddy, why did Uncle Ivan call you a quitter?”
That one hit him like a left hook to the chops. Kids were often direct, and any child of Chelsea’s couldn’t help being
that
direct. Ainsley didn’t just
look
like her mother.
“I think he was just mad,” said Ryan.
“About what?”
Her face was barely visible in the shadow of her Hello Kitty night-light, but Ryan could see the inquisitiveness in her expression.
“That’s really a long story.”
“I got nowhere to go,” she said.
He chuckled. She was growing up so fast.
“Is it about Mommy?” she said.
That drained the smile from his face. Ainsley, too, looked serious.
“In a way, yes.”
Ainsley sat up, her back against the headboard. “We had Red Ribbon Week at school. You know, when they tell you how bad drugs are.”
It seemed like an abrupt change of topic, but he knew somehow Ainsley was going to tie it back around. “That’s a good thing,” he said.
“Do you know Amanda Hearst?”
“No, I don’t.”
“Amanda’s a fifth-grader. She’s really smart. She’s my reading buddy. We read together every Thursday during second period.”
“That’s really nice. But it’s a school night and—”
“She told me that Mommy got killed by someone who was drunk. Is that true?”
Another left hook. This one had Ryan on the ropes. He had talked with Ainsley about the car accident and explained that her mother lived in heaven. But he had been saving the part about drinking and driving until Ainsley was a little older. He didn’t want to lie to her, however, and her reading buddy at school was right.
“Yes, Amanda is telling the truth. The police have always thought it was a drunk driver who ran Mommy’s car off the road.”
“So, Mommy died because somebody drank too much?”
He squeezed her hand and said, “I know that sounds so unfair. But yes, I’m afraid that’s what happened.”
She glanced away for a moment, toward the ducks and rabbits on her wallpaper. Then she looked back at him and said, “Then how come you drink so much?”
“Where did you hear
that
?”
“Claricia.”
“She told you I was drinking?”
“Not exactly. I heard her talking on the phone to Uncle Ivan.”
This was getting out of hand—like the media frenzy after he’d nearly fallen asleep at the wheel because of a sleeping pill and was stopped for suspected drunk driving. Even though he wasn’t guilty, he’d spent hours on his radio show explaining to callers that he hadn’t thrown away his career to booze.
“Claricia means well,” said Ryan. “But I don’t have a drinking problem.”
“Do you drink at all?”
“Well, yes. Occasionally.”
“Why?”
Good question. “It’s something that some grown-ups choose to do. Unfortunately, even grown-ups don’t always know when to quit.”
She lay back on her pillow. He wished he could find the right thing to say, but more than anything he wanted the conversation to end.
“I love you,” he said.
“Love you, too.”
He sat there, wondering if she was going to ask another question. The silence was almost more than he could endure, but finally she was asleep. Ryan didn’t want to wake her, so he stayed in the bed with her. His eyes grew heavy. He needed sleep, but the more he wanted it, the more elusive it became. His mind would not shut off, not even with the calming breath of his little girl next to him. She was deep into dreamland.
Good thing insomnia isn’t contagious.
It wasn’t a disease in its own right, his doctors had told him. It was “symptomatic.” Symptomatic of what? That was what Ryan wanted to know. The death of his wife? The thought of the drunk bastard who’d killed her still going out every night and tipping back drinks? The fact that no matter how hard he tried, he could never be the father Ainsley deserved, let alone the father
and
the mother.
Daddy, why do you drink?
It’s something that some grown-ups choose to do.
How lame was that answer? And Ainsley was only in kindergarten. The really tough questions were yet to come. Why is my body changing? Did you and Mommy actually do
that
? How old were
you
the first time you had sex? What business is it of yours what I do with my boyfriend?
Sorry, Chelsea. I just wasn’t cut out to do this alone.
By 1:12
A.M.
he could no longer stand staring at the ceiling. In less than five hours he had a radio show to do.
Ryan tiptoed out of Ainsley’s room and went down the hall to his own bed. He stripped down to his boxers, slid under the covers, and closed his eyes, hoping that sleep might come easier in his own room, away from Ainsley, away from that angelic reminder of the way he used to sleep so peacefully at Chelsea’s side. But it was useless. It was destined to be another one of those nights where rest would be one or two good yawns, at most.
And in the darkness, his closet beckoned.
He switched on the light and went to it. The box he wanted was behind his golf clubs. He dug it out, placed it on the floor, and sat down beside it. Opening it wasn’t easy, but it wasn’t about strength. He needed courage.
He removed the lid, and the journey began.
Right on top was a five-year-old copy of
Sports Illustrated
.
LONGHORNS REIGN
was the cover story. Ryan and his University of Texas teammates were on the field, a human pile of celebration after they’d won another College World Series in Omaha. Ryan was voted series MVP—eleven hits with three home runs—which no one would have predicted. He had been in a batting slump going into the playoffs. His confidence shaken, he tried everything to snap out of it. In the end, a simple talk, man to man, turned him around. He remembered his coach telling him that it wasn’t a game about balls and bats. Baseball was like life, a thinking man’s game, a matter of the mind. Ryan had a career batting average of .305 in college, which made him a star, and which also meant that he failed seven out of ten trips to the plate. “You have to put the last failure behind you,” his coach had told him. “If you don’t, it’s over.”
Ryan laid the magazine aside, and the open box called to him like a portal to the past. Next on the pile was a plaque that had been mounted over his locker. The same plaque hung over every Longhorn player’s locker, and it was such an established creed that the same message was painted in huge block letters on the clubhouse wall, the first thing players saw when they entered from the dugout:
THE PRIDE AND WINNING TRADITION OF THE TEXAS LONGHORNS WILL NOT BE ENTRUSTED TO THE WEAK OR THE TIMID
.
It was painful, but Ryan finally realized that he had broken that trust.
It would have been easy to blame it all on Chelsea’s death, but the groundwork for this downward spiral had been laid long ago. Perhaps if he had taken the sleeping pills his doctor had prescribed after the funeral, he would never have started on the slippery slope of insomnia. But he had been afraid of them—afraid of his own addictive personality, which he had discovered in college. He and his buddies at Jester Hall would start at Buffalo Billiards on Brazo and Sixth Street, share a pitcher of beer or two in one of the cowhide booths. Next was the Blind Pig Pub, then across the street to Shakespeare’s Alehouse (
HELPING UGLY PEOPLE GET LAID SINCE
1991), back across the street to Darwin’s Pub (
SURVIVAL OF THE DRUNKEST
), and then finally over to The Drink, where athletes broke training. Too much drinking, way too easy. It was amazing that he’d never ended up at the Black Cat Tattoo Shop for a lifelong memory of another forgettable night. He’d finally straightened himself out, but an experience that bad was enough to make him choose sleepless nights over sleeping-pill addiction.
Ryan could have sat all night beside his box of mementos and drowned in the past. Instead, he picked himself up from the bedroom floor and headed downstairs. This was a journey he’d made before, usually late at night, bearing his load of regrets like a Mount Everest Sherpa. But this time he felt different.
He went to the phone and dialed Ivan’s number. It was late, but Ryan needed to do this—now.
“Hello?” Ivan answered in a sleepy voice.
“It’s me,” said Ryan.
“Dude, what time is it?”
“I’m ready,” was all Ryan said.
He knew that Ivan had been waiting a long time to hear those words, and Ryan had vowed never to say them unless he truly meant them.
“I believe you,” said Ivan.
Ryan smiled to himself. He believed, too.
Emma was becoming an addict, she was sure of it.
Once upon a time she’d been able to brush her teeth, shower, do her makeup, get dressed, maybe even have breakfast—all before checking her e-mail. Her BlackBerry had changed all that.
The sleep barely out of her eyes, she was already scrolling down her list of messages.
Many of them had short subject lines (“Re: Carver Sentencing”), and the majority were from her usual group of contacts and colleagues. But the third one from the top looked unusual, the “Re” line reading like a message in and of itself, and before she knew it, she’d opened the e-mail, which immediately sent chills down her spine: “Why haven’t you arrested him? Are you going to LET HIM GET AWAY WITH THIS?”
The sender’s screen name was a jumble of numbers rather than an actual name. Emma didn’t waste time trying to figure out if there was any significance to the number sequence. She read the rest of the message.
It was only one paragraph. One quick reading was enough to tell her that it was no prank. She would have her tech experts try to trace the e-mail, but probably it had been sent from an airport kiosk or business center under an untraceable address. It could have been from anyone. Except that she knew it wasn’t just anyone. It was her tipster. And he was advancing from the cute coded words in the newspaper.
She dialed her boss and gave Assistant Attorney General Glenda Garrisen the news. “We need to meet,” said Emma. “First thing.”
EMMA ENTERED HER BOSS’S OFFICE TO DISCOVER THAT THEY WERE
going to be joined by a third person: Brandon Lomax.
Glenda Garrisen was seated in the oxblood leather chair behind her antique mahogany desk. She was an exceptional lawyer who referred to herself as a Radcliffe woman, which was only technically correct: she’d enrolled in 1976, the year before Radcliffe placed all of its undergraduate women in Harvard College. Whatever her alma mater, she was a refined woman with exquisite taste. The Impressionist oil paintings on the walls were of museum quality, and someone long ago had sacrificed five years of living, one knot at a time, to the priceless Sarouk rug on the floor. History all but spoke from her collection of leather-bound law books on glass-encased shelves, several volumes predating the election of Rhode Island’s first attorney general in 1650. Nothing in Glenda Garrisen’s office was government issued. While such displays of wealth might have raised suspicions about some lawyers presumably living on the paltry salary of a civil servant, the four-carat diamond ring on her finger explained it all, even if she chose not to clutter her office with pendants, photographs, or other memorabilia of her husband’s beloved PawSox.
Seeing Emma’s surprised face, the chief said, “I thought it was time to let Brandon respond to the anonymous tips.”
Emma agreed—in theory. Her relationship with the Lomax family and her respect for Lomax as a former boss, however, raised an internal red flag. Layered on top of that history was the fact that Lomax had appointed Glenda Garrisen to her position as chief of the Criminal Division—a position he had once held himself—and it was the last appointment he made before leaving the Office of the Attorney General to run for the U.S. Senate. Glenda’s wealthy husband, Connie Garrisen, had known Lomax for many years, and while Glenda never made campaign contributions, her husband was among the biggest fund-raisers for the Lomax campaign. Emma could only assume that the chief had taken all that into consideration when she invited Lomax to join them.
Emma also assumed that Chief Garrisen had advised him of his right to be represented by an attorney.
“Where would you like me to start?” said Emma.
“Actually,
I
would like to start,” said Lomax. “This is character assassination, pure and simple.”
Emma said, “From the beginning, I’ve been suspicious of the timing of this tip.”
“It’s bogus,” said Lomax. “What conceivable reason could anyone have for not coming forward with this evidence three years ago? Why would they implicate me anonymously unless the tip is nothing but a scandalous lie started by my political enemies to disparage me before the election?”
“I’ve asked myself the same questions,” the chief said.
“So have I,” said Emma. “But this latest tip presents a bigger problem.”
“Let’s hear it,” said Lomax.
Emma glanced at Garrisen. The chief nodded, giving Emma the go-ahead. Emma said, “The e-mail message included information that adds serious credibility to the accusations against you.”
“What does that mean?” said Lomax.
“It contains important details that only someone who had actually seen Brandon Lomax at the scene of crime would know.”
Lomax glanced at the chief. “I can’t respond if you aren’t going to get specific.”
“Tell him,” Garrisen said to Emma.
“According to the e-mail, the tipster saw Brandon Lomax stop his car and walk over to the crashed vehicle. When he saw how badly Chelsea was injured, he vomited. That version of events jibes with the evidence found at the accident scene three years ago.”
“I don’t recall hearing anything about vomit at the scene while I was attorney general,” said Lomax.
Emma said, “That was a matter of investigative strategy that wouldn’t have found its way up to the attorney general’s desk. You can’t get a blood-alcohol reading from the contents of someone’s stomach, but vomit does contain saliva, and that saliva could provide enough DNA for the police to do a test on a suspect. The idea was to keep the DNA a secret—our ace in the hole to be played only after the prime suspect had been identified, interrogated, and locked into his story.”
Lomax shot her a look that only a father could give. “Is that what you intended to do with me, Emma? Lock me in?”
“No, not at all. In fact, now that all of this is out in the open, the quickest way to exonerate you is to do a simple DNA—”
“Hold on,” said the chief. “I am not going to ask the former attorney general for a DNA sample.”
Emma paused to choose her words. “With all due respect to both of you, why not?”
“Number one, I’m sure there will be no match. Number two, simply asking a man like Brandon Lomax for a DNA sample sends a message to the press that the attorney general’s office considers these anonymous tips credible. I don’t care to send that message. Even after the lab comes back with no match, a cloud of suspicion will hang over him for the duration of the campaign.”
“So, it’s a political decision?” said Emma.
“No,” the chief said firmly. “It’s a question of fairness and prosecutorial discretion. This isn’t the Duke lacrosse rape case. I don’t ruin people for no reason.”
Emma suddenly felt the combined weight of the stares from her current boss and her former one. But she was not going to let personal feelings—hers or the chief’s—stand in the way of professional judgment. “Okay, no DNA sample. But I have to go somewhere with this investigation. How about an alibi?”
“What about it?” said Lomax.
“Do you have one?” said Emma. “I don’t mean to insult you, but you could put this to a quick end by establishing your whereabouts at the time of Chelsea’s accident. We don’t even have to involve the crime lab or the police department. I’m simply asking you to give me some objectively reasonable justification for closing the door on this anonymous tipster.”
“You’re talking about three years ago. I couldn’t even tell you where I was three weeks ago.”
“Check your records, your calendar, whatever you need to do,” said Emma.
“All right,” said Lomax. “I’m sure I’ll be able to dig out something or someone who can tell you exactly where I was.” He looked at Garrisen and said, “But let’s not lose sight of the big picture here. Like I said at the beginning: this is politically motivated character assassination. While that might not be a crime in most situations, providing false information to law enforcement most certainly
is
.”
“You’re absolutely correct about that,” said the chief.
“I know I am,” said Lomax. “And Emma knows I’m right, too. Don’t you, Emma?”
She suddenly felt like a chastised teenager. “Yes. I do.”
“Good. Since we’re all on the same page, I think it’s time we come up with a plan to lure this scumbag out into the open. And then we can expose him for what he is—an anonymous fraud who is trying to ruin my good name and reputation.”
“Do you have a specific plan in mind?” the chief said.
“I do,” said Lomax. “It involves Emma.”
“Me?” she said.
“Yes,” said Lomax. “You.”